Our Unwitting Teachers

Ninth grade was a tumultuous year for me. Too much to go into here–but many ups and downs. In the spring, I discovered that I enjoyed running track. Though bad at sports overall, I had good endurance; I was one of the few in the school who could run a full mile, at a good pace, without stopping. (Later I brought it up to three.) Through running, I got to know a few students outside of my usual circles. They chose to run with me because they trusted that I wouldn’t stop halfway through. As we were running, we had short-winded conversations about all kinds of things.

One day I was running with a girl who had lost a family member a few years before. We were talking (inasmuch as we could) about life, and she said, “I want to experience everything–both the good and the bad.” Given what she had been through, this moved me and stayed on my mind afterward. I thought about how everything we go through can contribute to who we are; all of it, taken properly, can be a gift, no matter how difficult it seems at the time. I thought, also, of the ending of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, which I had just read in class.

A month or two later, toward the end of the year, I decided to tell her that her words had helped me. I asked whether she had a few minutes to talk. She agreed and went with me to the “fountain room,” a luminous nook with French windows and doors, in a corner of the hallway near the drinking fountain. I told her what I have said just here. She looked surprised and happy but didn’t say much.

Later, when she signed my yearbook, she wrote: “You have been a source of knowledge about myself this year. Your talent and persistence has inspired me and helped me be calm and level headed. You told me that I helped you–well, telling me that made me cry that night in bed, because just earlier I had been chastising myself for being insensitive and unresponsive to so many people that were sensitive and yet very far away from me. I am so glad that I was able to do something for you. You deserve happiness and if I was able to help you attain that end, then I am happy.”

We were each other’s unwitting teachers. At the time, I wondered just how much people held back from each other, how many good things they could say to each other if they dared. Years later, it seemed to me that such inhibitions might have a place, that they might make room for the understood, the understated, and things that don’t go easily into words.

Now I see it in both ways. There are many who have taught and helped me and probably do not know it. Maybe it is a shame that they do not know it; maybe it is for the better. Sometimes the one seems true, sometimes the other, but I never know for certain which one holds.

Overall, we hold back from telling people what they taught us; thus, people have little idea how much they bring to others. Yet there’s no way to delimit “how much” these teachers bring; the students themselves do not know. So, speaking and holding back can both be wrong. But there is no wrong in perceiving one’s teachers: taking in their particular words and cadences and returning to them over time. There must be good in noticing these things without trying to capture them, without trying to say exactly how much or what they mean.

As of November 2017, she teaches English, American civilization, and British civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. From 2011 to 2016, she helped shape and teach the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering in New York City. In 2014, her students released the inaugural issue of their philosophy journal, CONTRARIWISE, which has international participation and readership.